A U.S. Justice Department official is warning on-line predators are engaging in a new form of extortion. Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Duax: “And ‘Sextortion’ is essentially when the offender gets a compromising image or a compromising piece of information about the victim and then threatens the victim with the disclosure of that information if the victim doesn’t engage in sexually-explicit conduct or send him sexually-explicit images.”

In 2014, a 24-year-old Cedar Rapids man was sentenced to 42 years in prison for coercing a dozen girls between the ages of 12 and 15 into sending him photos via text or Facebook and other online sites. Duax says the man then threatened to post the sexually-explicit images he already had online or send the photos to the girls’ parents and friends if they didn’t continue to send him more pictures.

“As a parent you definitely need to know what your child is using on their device, who they’re communicating with on their device and to try to set forth some ground rules for your children when they’re using those machines,” Duax says. “And it’s not easy, sometimes, to have those discussions, but if you don’t, you run the right of being one of the parents of the kids I just talked to you about.”

Duax says U.S. law enforcement agencies investigated 54-thousand reports of online sexual predators in fiscal year 2015, leading to more than 85-hundred arrests. The Cedar Rapids man who was sentenced in that 2014 “sex-tortion” case kept on threatening one girl even after she sent him a text saying she was considering suicide.

(Radio Iowa)